Thursday, 11 October 2012

The Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge

Freddy (Robert Englund) is tired of being limited to only killing hapless and lusty teenagers in their dreams, and decides to resolve this issue by slowly possessing and taking over a dude called Jesse (Mark Patton), happily framing poor Jesse for all the murders.

I can draw a lot of parallels between this film and "Candyman":

Ghostly bad guy who can affect the dream 'verse

Possession of the protagonist, who then kills people without knowing it (at first)

Protagonist waking up in strange places or being covered in blood...

Questions as to whether Freddy is real or a figment of our friend Jesse's imagination!

Unlike "Candyman" though, the plot's not clever. It's just a Freddy Krueger story!

80s gore to the max, with a lot of sub-par teen actors, slightly uncomfortable possessed sex scenes and some questionable parenting, this film doesn't exactly exceed the expectations of its viewer.

Englund's return to the stripy jumper and glove is once again gleefully portrayed as the nightmarish fiend, and his evil determination to take over Jesse and kill everyone nearby keeps the story moving. But unlike the first film, there's just no oomph.

The rampantly peadophilic-goth-club-patron-gym-teacher is an odd addition... But his death scene is quite hilarious, with reference to Rod's death scene in the first film.

The ending of the film is a lot faster paced than the rest of it, with quite a good round-off and classic Krueger cliffhanger ending.

This film is sans Craven, and it shows. He didn't like the idea of a franchise (apparently. He is the king of franchises, if you ask me!) and didn't like them taking Freddy out of dream land. I can agree with him here, Freddy's no fun in the real world!